Verwandte Artikel zu After America

9780345502919: After America
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345502914 ISBN 13: 9780345502919
Verlag: Del Rey, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Traces the harrowing reconstruction of the United States after most of its population is killed by a natural disaster, an effort lead by President James Kipper and challenged by pirates, freebooters, and a rogue governor of Texas.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

\John Birmingham is the author of Without Warning, Final Impact, Designated Targets, Weapons of Choice, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, How to Be a Man, The Search for Savage Henry, and Leviathan, which won the National Award for Nonfiction at Australia’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts. He has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, and numerous other magazines. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.

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Chapter One


New York

“No siree, Mister President, you do not get these from pettin’ kitty cats.”

James Kipper nodded, smiling doubtfully as the slab-shouldered workman flexed his biceps and kissed each one in turn. His Secret Service guys didn’t seem much bothered, and he’d long ago learned to pick up on their unspoken signals and body language. They paid much less attention to the salvage crew in front of him than to the ruined façades of the office blocks looking down on the massive, rusting pileup in Lower Manhattan. The hard work and unseasonal humidity of Lower Manhattan had left the workman drenched in sweat, and Kipper could feel the shirt sticking to his own back.

Having paid homage to his bowling-ball-sized muscles, the workman reached out one enormous, calloused paw to shake hands with the forty-forth president of the United States. Kipper’s grip was not as strong as it once had been and had certainly never been anywhere near as powerful as this gorilla’s, but a long career in engineering hadn’t left him with soft fingers or a limp handshake. He returned the man’s iron-fisted clench with a fairly creditable squeeze of his own.

“Whoa there, Mister President,” the salvage and clearance worker cried out jokingly. “I need these dainty pinkies for my second job. As a concert pianist, don’tcha know.”

The small crush of men and women gathered around Kipper grinned and chuckled. This guy was obviously the clown of the bunch.

“A concert penis, you say?” Kipper shot back. “What’s that, some sorta novelty act? With one of those really tiny pianos?”

The groan of his media handler, Karen Milliner, was lost in the sudden uproar of coarse, braying laughter as the S&C workers erupted at the exchange. That did put his security detail a little on edge, but the man-mountain with the kissable biceps was laughing the loudest of them all, pointing at the chief executive and crying out, “This fuggin’ guy. He cracks me up. Best fuggin’ president ever.”

Kipper half expected to be grabbed in a headlock for an affectionate noogie.

That would have set his detail right off.

But after a few moments the uproar receded.

Kipper’s gaze fell on a woman, who’d remained unusually reserved throughout. Doubtless one or two of his detail were watching her closely from behind their darkened sunglasses. He caught her eye and favored her with an indulgent grin by which he meant to convey a sense of amused pity. She obviously did not fit in with this gang of roughnecks. Her features were fine-boned, and she didn’t look like somebody used to long days of heavy manual labor. As he so often found when he traveled around to “meet the peeps”—his daughter’s term, not his—the peeps intrigued him. This nation of castaways and lost souls all had their stories. And you had to wonder what paths had brought biceps guy and this quiet woman to New York three years after the Wave had dissipated as mysteriously as it had arrived.

“Mister President,” Karen Milliner said, “we really need to get a move on—the schedule, you know.”

Jostled out of his momentary ponderings by the director of communications, his flak catcher in chief, he nodded and smiled apologetically to the workers.

“I’m sorry, guys. Just like you, I am a mere civil servant, and my boss here”—he jerked a thumb at Milliner—“says I gotta get back to work.”

The small crowd booed her but cheered him as he waved and began to walk away with his personal security detail shadowing every step. Cries of “Thank you, Mister President” and “Way to go, Kip” followed him down into the graveyard of corporate America.

The stillness of the ruins soon returned. Grit and debris crunched underfoot as the party picked its way through the wreckage of Wall Street. Only the sound of the pigeons, which had returned to the city in plague numbers, broke the silence. The ecosystem within the Wave-affected area seemed to be outstripping all scientific predictions in terms of recovery. Wood chips and piles of tree branches lined the streets. The buzzing roar of chain saws joined in with the heavy metal crash of machinery. Much of the cleanup work in places like Manhattan pertained just as much to brush clearance as to vehicle pileups or burned-out buildings. It wasn’t like the great charred wastelands left by the firestorms that had covered so much of North America. There was life here, of a sort. He could smell it in the fresh-cut timber of an island fast reverting to its original, heavily wooded state.

Away from the raucous cheers of the salvage crew, Kipper fell deep into the well of his own thoughts. He took in the sight of a Mister Softee ice cream van that had speared into the front of the Citibank at the corner of Wall and Front streets. A couple of bicycles lay crushed under its wheels, and jagged shards of glass had ripped through the scorched, filthy rags that once had clothed the riders. He had to remind himself that they hadn’t died in the auto accident. They had simply Disappeared like every other soul in this empty city, like everyone across America four years ago.

“Traffic’s not too bad here,” he ventured to Jed Culver for want of something better to say. “Not like back on . . . what was that last cross street, where those guys were cleaning up?”

“Water Street, sir,” one of his Secret Service detail offered. He was a new guy. Kip didn’t know his name yet, but his accent was local. You had to wonder what that was doing to his head.

“Most of these cars were parked when the Wave hit,” Culver added. “Mostly pedestrians and bike riders through here, health nazis, that sort of thing. Water Street was busier.”

Culver’s soft Southern drawl, a Louisiana lilt with a touch of transatlantic polish, trailed off. The silence of the necropolis, a vast crypt for millions of the Disappeared, seemed to press the air out of him. Kip turned back to gaze down the shadowed canyon of the old financial district. The intersection of Water and Wall was a wrecking yard of yellow cabs, private cars, and one armored van that had been broadsided by a dump truck and knocked completely over. The impact had smashed open both rear doors, and a few buff-colored sacks of old money still lay unwanted on the ground. None of the salvagers bothered with the dead currency, which long since had been replaced by the less valuable New American Dollar. They had returned to attacking the tangle of metal with earthmoving equipment, sledgehammers, chains, and pure grunt.

It was the loudest noise in the city.

Kip shook his head and turned back.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”

At the corner of the JP Morgan Building they encountered the weather-worn façade of the New York Stock Exchange. A large soiled and tattered American flag hung loosely from the Roman columns of the neoclassical structure, held in place by creeping vines as much as by nylon ropes. Kipper had never been to Wall Street, or New York City for that matter, and photographs of the Street always made it appear larger than life. Now, here, in the presence of what had been the most powerful engine of capitalism on the planet, it felt small and almost claustrophobic.

Down at the end of the street he could see a church of some sort, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. Kipper wasn’t a religious man, but the sight of the steeple deepened his melancholy, driving it toward the deeper blue depths. More than a...

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Verlag
Del Rey
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345502914
ISBN 13 
9780345502919
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
465
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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